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The support Mayor Rob Ford still enjoys from a significant swath of the public is neither surprising nor mystifying. He’s a populist politician — actually, more of a populist than a politician — and that always finds traction because it doesn’t require deep analysis of the record or review of campaign promises. Superficial sloganeering, boilerplate messaging, resonates when it’s what people want to hear.

“Stop the Gravy Train” did for Ford three years ago what “Hope” and “Change We Can Believe In” did for Barack Obama in 2008. The latter, more inspirational in subtext, appealed to a reversal of cynicism in an electorate yearning for higher ideals and nobler pursuits for a nation that didn’t like what it had become under the Bush administration.

Ford aimed lower. What he vowed was a reversal of entitlement and wastefulness at city hall, which had reached fever pitch during David Miller’s smug tenure.

While I may not completely understand the divergent forces that coalesced to make Ford mayor of Toronto — though predictable backlash against Millerite elitism had much to do with it — I do know what does not define Ford Nation now, as he brazens it out through the repercussions of Crackgate.

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This is not about left versus right.

Those are no longer distinct constituencies, certainly not at the level of municipal politics, which tend towards the local and practical: garbage pickup, public transit, housing, property taxes and potholes. Meat and potato issues. And Ford is a meat and potatoes guy. Even his clumsy speechifying is endearing to many supporters, reflecting their own plain-speak preferences and anti-intellectual prejudices.

So Ford sticks to the Grade 2 Dick and Jane primer script. His current “Anything else?” mantra at press conferences — the persistent refusal to address any questions about an alleged drug scandal now in its third week of not-going-away — has become a comical trope.

But, I repeat, the Ford polarization doesn’t cleave to left-right affiliations. There were an awful lot of lefties, even in the downtown core, who voted for Ford last time around, for the same reasons that hard right types embraced the candidate’s agenda — out of self-interest. Lefties want better trash collection and lower taxes, too. Nor can the ever-expanding ripples of that cellphone video seeming to show Ford smoking a crack pipe and a photograph of the grinning mayor standing with three men — one since murdered, another wounded in that same shooting, the purported crack house where the photo was taken now identified by the Star — be remotely conflated with the anti-Ford bloc on city council.

While undoubtedly savouring Ford’s woes, with some calling for his resignation, the mayor’s usual big-mouth critics have in no way been implicated in the reporting investigations launched by media, particularly the Star and the Globe and Mail. There’s no agenda afoot. This is a spectacular story, moving incrementally along, now even entwining, possibly, with a man who went out of a window from a building in Fort McMurray.

Yet it behooves Ford’s acolytes to cling to some kind of lefty political or Star-generated conspiracy against the mayor because, you know, we hate the man and are still trying to undo his election. This is the last refuge of scoundrels who’ve had their asses kicked on a humongous story.

I usually avoid commenting on the comments of other commentators. It is lazy journalism to just sit back and pontificate over what others have written or broadcast. It’s also too inside-baseball. But respected columnist friends and I have often — in private, not for publication — deplored the work habits of fellow practitioners of columny who never report a damn thing, never put in the leg-work, never venture to the front lines but move in afterwards to shoot the wounded. They merely opine on the hard-slogging work of others. If we are maggots — as Ford infamously proclaimed — they are leeches. Or maybe remora fish, attaching themselves to the shark’s mouth and feeding off leftover fragments.

The Ford crack saga, I acknowledge, is an exception because of its unique dimensions. It’s perfectly okay to debate the ethics of meeting with an alleged drug dealer to view the videotape, as two Star reporters did, or to attempt buying that disputed item, as U.S.-based website Gawker tried by crowd-sourcing the money demanded. It is not okay, however, to impugn the professional reputation of journalists, men and women with solid reporting chops, simply because the information they relay is not to your liking or damages your hero.

To recalibrate events as some kind of ongoing plot, character assassination run amok — as if the whole scandal has no basis and its mushrooming consequences over the past three weeks are irrelevant — is shabby, empty, partisan posturing. To cast it, tiresomely, as a right-left ideological divide is lame. To cluck-cluck over whither-journalism is patronizing, digressive and hugely beside the point.

The point is Ford, Rob Ford and his conjoined brother-ally Doug Ford, and their alleged association with drug use and drug dealing. The point is that, for all their fulminations over the past three weeks — on their radio show, at narrowly constrained conferences, during self-serving TV appearances (that would be Doug) — the accusations about Rob and crack cocaine have not been quelled.

At his Friday 4 o’clock — the preemie campaign press conferences Ford has taken to holding late in the day, this one about a social housing report — the mayor déjà-blew-off a question about breach of the public’s trust over his refusal to address the cascading coke scandal, specifically his attendance at the Windsor Rd. house where one resident was convicted of trafficking cocaine.

“Any other questions with respect to this report in front of us?”

Nope. Good day and good riddance.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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